Engaged with the world

I found some old notes today, typed hurriedly years ago whilst I was reading My Trade: A Short History of British Journalismby Andrew Marr - a good book for anyone interested in journalism, journalists and how their work interacts with and mediates our world. I remember reading on climbing forum a couple of summers ago someone asking "why is everyone talking about riots?" This person wasn't interested in the news; cynical about all politics, she had made a conscious decision simply not to watch or read any, and as a result was unaware that there were major incidences of public disorder breaking out across the UK including, if I remember correctly, in the centre of the city where she lived. Whilst this struck me as misguided, it also seemed an almost heroic decision to make - it must take quite some mental effort to ignore all news, not to absorb any. I feel I get news, and hence am engaged in politics, almost by osmosis these days - what you eat, how you travel around, using a library, paying a bill all seem to be political acts in some way as a result. Anyway, Marr writes:

I know people who barely read a paper and who think most broadcast news is mindless nonsense. I think, however, they are wrong. They might go through their weekly round, taking the kids to school, shopping, praying, doing some voluntary work, phoning elderly relatives, and do more good than harm as they go. But they have disconnected themselves from the wider world; rather like secular monks, they have cloistered themselves in the local. And this is not good enough. We are either players in open, democratic societies, all playing a tiny part in their ultimate direction, or we are deserters. (p.63)

Sometimes it is nice to switch off; to go for a walk in the mountain, for a ski in forests - but switching off forever? Is Marr right that this is desertion?

Repeal Proposition 8

The recriminations over the passing of California’s Proposition 8 roll on. The fact that the Mormon Church was central to funding the campaign in favour of the anti-gay marriage law has meant it has become the target of the ire of many gay rights campaigners. I saw this photo on Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish:


Look at the sign of the woman on the right – both very witty and a plaintive cry at the same time.

The more I think about the issue of gay marriage, the more angry I get at those who want to stop it because the less I can understand their position - at least in the liberal democracies of the world where we claim to believe in civil rights. What consenting adults do amongst themselves when it has absolutely no impact on anyone else seems to be completely their own business. Yet the moralising right, normally so keen on getting “government out of peoples’ way” suddenly want to stick it straight back in front of them again if those people happen to be two men or two women who want to spend their lives together. The idea that this some how threaten the stability of society just seems a farcical argument to make with out the psychological explanation that the person making it has homosexual feelings themselves that they are trying not to act on. I just do not understand how two men getting married has any impact on my life at all – I am straight in the same way that I am five foot ten. I can hang out with tall people all I like, but I’m not going to start growing. Instead, letting gay people marry seems essentially a small-c conservative thing to do. It accepts the rather boring social fact that when two people who love each want to make a public commitment of fidelity to each other, this is a stable and relatively successful way for society to work.

On serial killers and hypocrisy

I quite like watching Dexter, the series about the serial-killing-police-technician. It’s not on a level with great shows like the Wire, the Sopranos or Deadwood, all the cop characters are straight out of the ‘dummies guide to American TV cop clichés’, but it passes an hour in the evening when you want your brain to rest. So I sat down on Thursday night to watch it, only to find it had been pulled from the schedule and replaced with nature documentary. Clearly the management of Finland’s Nelonen TV channel thought that showing a series about a serial killer the day after a school massacre was in bad taste. But isn’t serial killing as entertainment always in bad taste? Last week’s edition of the superb This American Life was called “How to Rest in Peace”, and listening to it the day after the shooting in Jokela and just before sitting down, in vain as it was to turn out, to watch Dexter was one of those slightly spooky coincidences. This American Life interviewed a number of people who had had close family members murdered. The first woman whose father had been killed and the murderer never found, said that most normal people don’t realise what a huge amount of popular culture is based around murdering people. Not just television shows and movies, but books and even games like Cluedo. She pointed out that people even go to murder-mystery dinners where someone gets killed and then all the participants have to detect ‘whodunnit’. She fairly points out that we wouldn’t go to a rape-mystery dinner where the evening’s entertainment is sleuthing-out who the rapist is. That would be sick. So why is murder OK?

So, back to my missing episode of Dexter. If it was OK for me to watch a witty and righteous serial killer set against Miami’s pastel shades and beautiful people last week, why not this week? Pekka-Eric listed lots of films and music he liked, but no TV programmes. So no one is trying to blame Dexter for seven dead innocent Finns, indeed Auvinen even helpfully wrote in his ‘manifesto’: “Don’t blame the movies I see, the music I hear, the games I play or the books I read. No, they had nothing to do with this.” It would be nice, like after Columbine, to again blame Marilyn Manson because - quite frankly - his music is shit and his dress sense ridiculous. Getting kids to dress as Goths should be illegal, but it’s not and his lyrics about killing and suffering and death did not put a gun in Auvinen’s hand.

I watched another TV show on friday, Law and Order, that makes entertainment out of rape AND murder. The amusing thing is that one of the lead cops, ever ready to dish out justice to street punks, is played by Ice-T. One needs to be of a certain age and musical inclination to remember that Ice-T was once public enemy no.1. After his band Body Count released Cop-Killer, he was more of a public enemy than Public Enemy – that’s clearly pretty bad; or cool depending on your perspective. If I remember right the President Bush at the time denounced the song, and gansta rap generally, as a threat to national security. And now Ice-T is in Law and Order, the same show that Fred Thompson – running in the republican primaries for the presidential nomination for 2008 – also appears. Postmodern or just the American Dream?

So this brings me, from laughing along with serial killers, via rapping about killing cops, finally to rhyming couplets about chopping off heads. Amina Malik – who wanted to be known as the ‘Lyrical Terrorist’ – was found guilty in London this week of “possessing records [and I don’t think they meant Ice-T LPs] likely to be used for terrorism”. All the media has gone big on the poetry which included ditties such as: "Let us make Jihad/ Move to the front line/ To chop chop head of kuffar swine". Nice. But, thank God, we’re not yet imprisoning people for bad poetry. Yet. She was found innocent of charges of possessing an article for terrorism purposes, but found guilty of a lesser charge of having articles that could be useful for terrorism purposes. The law seems horribly illiberal, as surely many people will have some articles that could be useful for terrorism somewhere. I hate to think what the Met would be able to charge me with if they went through my office bookshelves and lever-arch files. Luckily my office does not come under UK law, but I haven’t heard of them raiding the offices of university department, think-tanks, and research institutes in London where my fellow terrorism researchers do their work, to seize their files. So rather it seems that Malik’s bad poetry and professed love for the Mujahideen is what made it a bad thing for her to possess such written material, there being no suggestion that she was actually planning violence or knew anyone who was. That sounds like a thought crime. It might be amusing if the police raided the houses of every far-right activist known to them to see if they have copies of the Turner Diaries next to Mein Kampf on their bookshelves, then arrest them. But it would also be illiberal and immoral. If the Malik case does suggest one thing, that is that Britain has sensible gun control laws. She possibly is or was crazy enough to kill people had she had the opportunity. But unlike Finland where it is easier to get a gun license than a driver's license, and unlike Pekka-Eric Auvinen, she didn’t get a gun and instead kept writing bad poetry on the back of till receipts. So we act shocked, tut at news, think what a terrible person she is and what an awful person he must have been, then flip the channel and settle down to enjoy and hour of being entertained by a serial killing.